Tuesday, 14 January 2014

TweetAs far as I’m
aware, the threatened horde of Romanians and Bulgarians who were (according to
Conservative politicians and tabloid newspapers) going to flood into the UK in their hundreds of
thousands following the relaxation of the rules on 1 January has yet to
happen.I don’t really expect it to
happen either – I suspect that this impending ‘crisis’ was manufactured from
the outset.

That “stopping
immigration” is a popular policy is undoubtedly true.Immigration is an issue about which people do
often express concerns, and vote-hungry politicians are only too happy to seize
on those concerns.But where do the
concerns come from in the first place?

I can – after a
fashion – understand how they might arise in areas with high immigrant
populations.But from personal
experience of many years of canvassing and campaigning in areas with very low
levels of non-UK residents (internal migration within the UK is a rather
different issue, which I’m going to park, for today at least), concerns about
immigration are much more general than that.Opinion polls seem to confirm that view.

It’s tempting
to blame the politicians themselves, or the tabloid press, but although both of
them should take some responsibility for fanning the flames, I don’t see any
evidence that they were responsible for striking the match.They are “merely” reflecting back and
exaggerating existing fears for their own purposes, be that winning votes or
selling newspapers.

So where did
the fire start – and why are so few trying, apparently, to extinguish it?I’m afraid that it starts from a place deep
inside the human psyche; an instinctive tendency to distinguish between “us”
and “others”.It gets rationalised
around economics – jobs, housing, benefits – but none of those things are the
root cause.It is so deeply ingrained in
our nature that I wonder if a distrust of “others” will ever be entirely
eliminated.It presumably served our
species well over its long evolution, but whether it serves the needs of an
overpopulated, resource-limited, and heavily armed modern world is another
question entirely.

But if we can’t
eliminate it, we can do more to counter its most pernicious expressions, by
dealing in fact rather than myth.Instead of that however, Cameron and his party seem to be determined to
try and outbid UKIP – which has, incredibly, managed to turn itself into the “moderate”
anti-foreigner party, when compared with nastier elements – in pandering to prejudice, with talk about stopping
benefits for migrants and so on.

One of the most
perceptive reactions to Cameron came from the Polish Foreign Minister, who asked“if Britain gets our taxpayers, shouldn’t it
also pay their benefits?”I found
that a very fair question indeed – and on two levels.

Firstly, at the
level of the immigrants themselves: if they are earning money and paying taxes
in any country, why indeed should that country not be responsible for funding
their benefits when necessary?It seems
pretty irrefutable that the UK Exchequer has gained more in total income from
taxes on the salaries of Eastern European immigrants than it has paid out in
benefits, although one would never know that from listening to the likes of
Cameron or Duncan-Smith.

But on a more
general level, an insistence on only accepting those who have a job to go to
and will “make a contribution”, to use the euphemism so beloved by the
government, means that the source country loses those most able to earn money, sees
their taxes flow into the coffers of another government, and still has to pay
the benefit bill for those who remain.It is not exactly a very fraternal action to take in relation to our
European partners, is it?

The
stigmatisation of benefits claimants is a worrying feature of modern politics; but seems to be becoming increasingly common across parties.The double stigmatisation of benefit
claimants who happen to be immigrants is doubly concerning. The history of
identifying and excluding “others” may well be based on a deep human instinct,
but it is not a happy history.Encouraging it, for whatever short term and selfish purposes, is a dangerous
course of action.